The Water Garden

Childe Hassam, The Water Garden
Metropolitan Museum of Art

The closest I can get to something like this is when I go to the arboretum. This looks like a lovely wild field with all of nature's variety on display.

Watercolour of Ellen Willmott's Garden

Alfred Parsons, Watercolour of Ellen Willmott's Garden

Inspired by Lines and Colors where you'll see many more of Parsons' paintings.

Irises

Irises, 1889, by Vincent van Gogh
via Wikipedia

The Painter's Garden

Der Garten der Malerin (The Painter's Garden), Edward B. Gordon

I've followed Edward B. Gordon for years and have featured many of his paintings here over the years. This lovely piece is made even lovelier by his reflection on it.

When my mother set eyes on this piece of land in 1999, there were only a few old oak trees and grass. If visitors were announced, you could see them on the horizon a week beforehand. Then she traded her paints, canvases, brushes and pencils for spades, Wellington boots, wheelbarrows and watering cans. The lines of her new drawings were bamboo grasses, birches and fruit trees, the perspective became an avenue, planes and shapes became bushes and leaves, the colours of her palette became the magnificent blossoms of rhododendrons, roses and lilies, dandelions and lavender. It fills my heart with deep humility and great joy to be able to paint all this 24 years on.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

(Center panel) The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-1504) by Hieronymus Bosch,
the best of his forty works that survive, uniquely combines medieval and renaissance,
horror and humour, religious and secular values, and figures and landscape. (Paul Johnson)

 I read an entire large art book on Bosch and wound up with a real appreciation for his work, as bizarre as it often looks. The author's premise was partly based on disproving what Paul Johnson mentions in his Art: A New History, that Bosch was a member of a quasi-heretical congregation. This was the first time, to be honest, that it occurred to me that these large art books could be written to prove or dispute others' scholarship. Silly of me, I know, since that goes on in every other field so why wouldn't that be the case for art?

At any rate, the point I enjoy the point Johnson makes about how "reading art" was a popular pastime. Popular or not, it's something we've lost in our age and which I appreciate learning a bit about under Johnson's tutelage.

Yet there was laughter in art, even if double-faced. It is a common modern view that Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) painted the horrors of life and death, and aimed to terrify and to enforce repentance, by his alarming compositions. ... But he also aimed to excite, to thrill, to fascinate and to amuse. There is literary evidence, unearthed by the sharp reader of texts as well as pictures Ernst Gombrich, that collectors bought Bosch for that reason. He made them laugh at folly and its consequences, as Hogarth was to do 250 years later. The minute events of his gruesome tales were fantasies and obviously so. Yet by painting them in the Flemish tradition of realism and attention to detail, he made them seem credible at a certain level, and because credible hilarious. So the men laughed uproariously when, alone with their wine, they collectively considered a Bosch work, and put on straight faces and didactic expressions when their women fold appeared and asked to have the painting "explained."

Garden Path

Garden Path, Edward B. Gordon

May Sun

Josef Mehoffer, May Sun, 1911
via Arts Everyday Living

Worth a Thousand Words: Celia Thaxter's Garden

Celia Thaxter's Garden, Isles of Shoals, Maine - Childe Hassam
Source

Garden Snail

Garden Snail, N Puttapipat Illustration

Autumn Leaves in Yokokan Garden

Autumn Leaves in Yokokan Garden, kskphoto via Find/47

 

Woman in the Garden

Woman in the Garden
a study in the effect of sunlight and shadow on colour
Claude Monet

Happy Birthday, Rose

The Roses of Heliogabalus by Alma-Tadema

Our celebration won't be quite on the scale (or style) of the one pictured. Though I do approve of their liberal enjoyment of roses.

Our own Rose is worthy of such a party though I think it would have to be a surprise party. We're going to have a modest, at home celebration with take out and a Cafe Latte Gingerbread Cheesecake (trying out an intriguing Mary Berry recipe).

We're so happy that Rose is here with us and not in L.A. We felt that way before the corona virus situation and it is doubled and redoubled now. Our lives are brighter thanks to her sense of humor, common sense, gardening, cooking, and (especially) Bollywood movie selections. Happy Birthday, Rose!

Camille Monet and a Child

Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist’s Garden in Argenteuil
Claude Monet, 1875
via WikiPaintings

There is a lot of information about the painting at the link, but nothing about what I love most in this painting — the child's rapt concentration on the book. That is so lifelike, so what I know from being around little ones and I love the way Monet is able to evoke it.

Garden of the Hospital in Arles

Garden of the Hospital in Arles, Vincent van Gogh

Monet in his garden at Giverny

Monet, right, in his garden at Giverny, 1922

Worth a Thousand Words: Garden at Vaucresson

Garden at Vaucresson, 1923, Édouard Vuillard

Worth a Thousand Words: The Old Gardener

The Old Gardener, Emile Claus

Worth a Thousand Words: The Oval Fountain in the Gardens of the Villa d'Este, Tivoli

Hubert Robert, The Oval Fountain in the Gardens of the Villa d'Este, Tivoli

Worth a Thousand Words: Statue of Jean Althen

Statue of Jean Althen, Papal Palace Gardens, Avignon, Belinda Del Pesco

Worth a Thousand Words: The Gardeners

Gustave Caillebotte, Les jardiniers, 1875